A historical study has shown that dinosaurs dominated the world until a deadly asteroid hit Earth about 66 million years ago, causing their mass extinction.
New insights into dinosaur ecosystems—the habitat (a set of resources and biological factors found in the environment) and the types of food that supported their life—suggest that their environment was secure and prosperous until the fateful day at the end of the Cretaceous.
The results provide strong evidence that the dinosaurs were not in decline but rather prospering at the time the asteroid hit Earth, dooming them to extinction.
Scientists have long debated why non-avian dinosaurs, including the T-rex and Triceratops, went extinct while other mammals and species such as turtles and crocodiles survived.
The study, led by an international team of paleontologists and environmentalists, analyzed 1,600 fossils from North America. The team modeled the food chains and ecological habitats of terrestrial and freshwater animals during the last few million years of the Cretaceous and the first few million years of the Paleogene after the asteroid impact.
And paleontologists have long known that many small mammals lived alongside dinosaurs.
But this study shows that these mammals diversified their diets, adapted to their environment, and became the most important components of ecosystems with the onset of the Cretaceous.
Meanwhile, the dinosaurs have established themselves in stable places, and have adapted very well to them.
Experts say that mammals didn’t just take advantage of the demise of the dinosaurs, but created their own advantage through diversification – occupying new ecological niches, developing more diverse diets and behaviors, and weathering small climate changes through rapid adaptation.
This behavior may have helped them survive because they were better than dinosaurs at handling the drastic and sudden destruction caused by the asteroid.
“Our study provides a compelling picture of the ecological structure, food webs, and niches of the last dinosaur-dominated ecosystems,” said study lead author Jorge Garcia-Giron from the Department of Geographical Research at the University of Oulu in Finland. Department of Biodiversity and Environmental Management of the University of León in Spain. “During the Cretaceous and the first mammal-dominated ecosystems after the asteroid impact. This helps us understand one of the ancient mysteries of paleontology: why all the non-avian dinosaurs perished, but the birds and mammals remained.”
Co-author Alfio Alessandro Ciarenza, from the Department of Ecology and Animal Biology at the University of Vigo, Spain, said: “It seems that the stable habitat of the last dinosaurs prevented their survival after the asteroid impact that changed dramatically. On the contrary, some birds, mammals, crocodiles and turtles were better adapted to unstable and rapid environmental changes, which may have made them more capable of surviving when something suddenly went wrong when an asteroid hit.
Senior author Professor Steve Brusatte, personal chair of paleontology and evolution at the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Dinosaurs were getting stronger, with stable ecosystems, until they were suddenly killed by an asteroid. diversifying their ecological diet and behavior when they were Dinosaurs were still alive, so the mammals were not just benefiting from the death of the dinosaurs, but they were seeking their own benefits that ecologically prepared them for extinction and relocation to the places left by the dead dinosaurs.”
A detailed recent study was published in the journal Science Advances.
Source: Science Daily.
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